JW: "The biggest issue has been the mental part, we crumble very easily and tend to overthink"

Jesper "⁠JW⁠" Wecksell spoke about fnatic's mental coach, their bleak performance against MIBR, and what they need to work on to be more consistent in our post-match interview.

The Swedish side took down Chiefs in the lower bracket of their group, 2-1, and will be facing Grayhound for a spot in the Qudos Bank Arena playoffs. Before their deciding match, we caught up with JW to hear about fnatic.

The three-time Major winner revealed that his squad has been struggling with the mental aspect of the game, talked about their map pool, and what they need to do to find more consistency moving forward.

I'll start with yesterday and the match against MIBR, especially since you guys picked Nuke and it didn't go that well, 0-15 on the first half. Tell me a bit about that, from your perspective, how did it manage to go so poorly?

I think we started off pretty badly, but they also have a couple of... not necessarily lucky rounds but they started well and they got kills through smokes and stuff like that. I think that got us in a bad confidence mode which, usually when that happens, people tend to take one step further when nobody else is ready, and we end up dying one by one. Yeah, we kept the communication and the team morale perfect I would say, throughout the whole game, but nothing ever went our way, and that can happen, especially on Nuke. It is one of those maps where you can just get locked out, it doesn't matter if you play perfect, if the other guys play perfectly as well, you have no chance. Yeah, props to them to beating us in such fashion.

Considering it on paper, it is maybe not the best map, but it is a decent one for your team, and it is not a really good one for them. Does this result then have any implications for your map pool maybe not being as strong as you would like?

Not necessarily. I think, as I said, those kinds of games can always happen on Nuke and we know that. We know we can play Nuke and that we are good on it, and we usually only play it against teams that we feel that are worse than us on it. So versus teams that barely play it, we tend to pick it, and usually, it goes our way, but sometimes it doesn't, that happens, it is CS after all.

After yesterday, did you make any changes to the way you approached the games for today?

We had a pretty good team talk after the game yesterday. We are working with the mental coach now so we know that we have to keep working on our mental stuff, and you can especially work on it when it is going rough. It is easy to have a good mentality when you are rolling over the opponent. So we had a really good team talk, we didn't really change up anything, we just talked about the mistakes we had, as well as the good stuff we did. Yeah, we just went in, reset for today, and won the game.

Can you tell me a bit about how you work with the mental coach? Is he here with you, do you do Skype stuff when you are at an event?

Yes, we hired Jens who previously worked with Ninjas in Pyjamas, he is traveling with us to every event and we are working very hard with him as a team but also as individuals. He is working closely with all the players and I think he is doing a really, really good job and I think all of us are showing good progress. but we are only at the start, so we are going to mess up a lot still because we are focused on other stuff in our heads as well. It is going to take some time to really settle, but I think we are doing huge steps with it already. He is going to keep traveling with us to every event and we are just going to keep working hard with him.

Touching on the Chiefs game, you lost Dust2 which was rough at some points, you managed to recover though. So tell me what happened and how you saw the Australian side?

In a perfect world, of course, we don't want to lose the first map, especially not in a matchup where I would say we are huge favorites, but at the same time I think it is really really good for us that we did, because we had games like this at the Major qualifier and this was the perfect moment for us to work on our mental side, to be able to reset in the next map and just come back. I think it was kind of good for us to lose the first map actually because we got to work on it a lot. Yeah, we shouldn't have lost it and I think we did some stupid mistakes and they started rolling. It shouldn't have happened, it did, we just have to make the best out of it.

You as a team have been quite up-and-down, you were at StarSeries where you finished second, you played pretty well there, but then only finished third at Pro League. So you are kind of inconsistent, do you see yourself reaching a more stable point and what do you think you need as a team to get there?

I think the biggest issue for us as a team has been the mental part of stuff, we crumble very easily and we tend to overthink stuff. We started to work with Jens at Pro League, two-three weeks ago, so that tournament, of course, the goal was to try and qualify for the LAN, but the main goal was to just work on the bases that he gave us. So it was a bit of a test event, we worked a lot on that side. Happily, we qualified for the next stage, so the goal was kind of reached anyways.

I think that here, of course, the goal is going to be playoffs. I think we can really do that if we keep having a good mentality, I think that is the biggest reason for us being so up-and-down. If we go into a game and things feel good, we can just roll over the opponent. The problem is when it doesn't start off good, we have been weak minded, especially I would say at the Major. We easily had the best practice results we ever had, we beat everybody and we did it very very well. Practice is only practice, but still, we went into the Major qualifier, started off poorly against these teams, and we instantly started to crumble. I think that is the biggest reason for us being so up-and-down.

And that is the main goal, together with Jens now, to have a high standard, to have our low level be high. I think that is what differs the "top-top" teams versus just the "top" teams. We want to be that team that consistently gets through the groups and consistently plays in the arenas, but it takes work. We are working really hard for it to come, but it might not come now or in a week or two, it is a process. Yeah, we know the problems, we are working really hard on them, so I think we just need time.